The Fillmore & Other Random Things of Late

I guess it's been a while since my last post. I'll spare you any excuses, but promise that I've been busy. The summer went by like a blur, I'm still wrapping my head around October, although it's one of my favorite months and is half over. The weather's been mellow -- there's a chill in the air, as if autumn here were like back east, and we had two days of rain and wind. It's even humid right now. The eucalyptus grove smelled rich this morning and my tea tasted better than ever.

Two weeks ago Sean and I spent an evening in San Francisco at the Fillmore; Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings performed. I'd seen them live twice in New York's Town Hall, but this last show was special. The Fillmore is sacred ground. I never really understood that idea until now.

On a basic level, The Fillmore as a music venue does everything right -- the staff are helpful and reasonable, not surly -- they even have a greeter ("Welcome to the Fillmore!"), like at Wal Mart. It's probably worth it to get there early and claim a table that overlooks the stage; they serve food that looks relatively inviting and is reasonably overpriced. Free ice water!

What makes The Fillmore sacred, however, is the atmosphere. Practically the entire place is carpeted, lending an inexplicable warmth to the air -- it felt like someone's home. Lining the walls, in chronological order, were the posters from every act that played there, broken up by framed photos of the more notable appearances: Ken Kesey juggling, Jerry Garcia throughout the years, Cypress Hill (how much fun would THAT have been?), Dave Chapelle. There's a supernatural harmony to that venue, as if time stops when you're there, as if you're inhabiting the past and present, simultaneously. In other ways, it's as if you've transcended time, to a point where there is no time at all, and you look down on the progression of decades as if they were hours, streaming past on screen.

I'm not a spiritual person, but The Fillmore brings me closest to the idea of faith -- that something much larger and deeper than yourself is in beautiful control.

Sean and I spent Labor Day weekend in San Francisco to celebrate our third (!) anniversary. He surprised me with acommodations at the Hotel de Arts for two nights, booking us the room that looks like CBGB's bathroom, only cleaner. That weekend we had a lavish dinner at Gary Danko and went to the Richard Avedon retrospective at SF MoMA, with lots of walking, napping and eating in between.

That weekend I realized how vital living in a city is -- the suburbs, where we've been for three years now, are dead. And deadening. It's safe, it's pretty, it's quiet, but who cares? It doesn't have the lifeblood that urban areas do. We're not ready to move out of this area yet, because of our jobs, but hopefully this will be our last suburban stay.

I'm reading Werner Herzog's, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, a book sprung from his journals in the late 70's while on location in South America.
(There is also a great movie about the film project, Burden of Dreams, which records Herzog's descent into madness as the jungle eats the entire project alive: I never thought that the sight of an earth mover could instill such fear in me.)

The book is great, thus far -- Herzog is observant, dry and hilarious. He doesn't bog the text down with minutia, and there is no sense of order, but he reconstructs the visceral horror of the jungle with snapshots of its inhabitants: human, animal and insect -- all beyond belief.

"Caracas, 22 June 1979

Caracas, Hotel Ávila. Slept a long time, woke up quite confused. I must have had horrible dreams, but do not remember what they were. There is no running water; I had wanted to take a long shower. I am keeping Janoud's money with me; I have a feeling things get stolen in this hotel.

The morning meeting with filmmakers was lively. I saw a bad feature film and lowered my expectations to a flicker. Caracas caught up in a frenzy of development. Nasty little mosquitoes are biting my feet. It rained heavily in the morning, and the lush mountains were shrouded in billows of mist, which made me feel good. The taxi drivers here are not to be trusted. I have not eaten all day. Signs of Life is playing; the guards at the entrance are bored. There is a melancholy peeping in the trees; I thought it was birds, nocturnal ones, but no, I was told, they were little tree frogs."

Windsor-Terrace Nostalgia

I was making pesto the other night and with my face over the bowl of fresh basil experienced a sensory memory of my last neighborhood in Brooklyn: Windsor-Terrace. I moved in there in January of 2001; my apartment was across the street from Prospect Park and not far from the start of Coney Island Avenue. It was an unspectacular 'hood in some ways - there were no nearby bars worth visiting, the bodegas closed before 11:00 (unthinkable), the only grocery store within a reasonable distance was a pitiful Key Food and most of the people who lived there had grown up there and never ventured very far. Greenwood cemetery was only blocks away and sort of set the tone of the area: quiet.

For what the neighborhood lacked in amenities, it overcompensated for with character. The bodega owner was Egyptian and usually tried to sell me 40 oz bottles of Pharaoh brand malt liquor because it was made in his home country. (I still don't believe that such an old civilization has no other inebriates to offer.) I befriended all the neighborhood dogs and the woman who worked in the laundromat told me all about squirrels in Russia (they're much prettier, apparently).

On my way to the subway one morning I passed a house that had a garden. Gardens in NY tend to vary -- this one was no exception -- the front "yard" was entirely paved, of course, so the garden was contained in flower boxes and tubs of various sizes. That morning a man was outside tending his plants. He noticed me admiring his work and handed me a sprig of basil. "Something nice to smell on your commute" he said. It was.

(I found this photo on Google - the people in the picture are standing by my former front door.)













Winsor-Terrace was quite possibly the only neighborhood in Brooklyn devoid of good pizza.

My bedroom faced the back of other apartment buildings. One night I woke to a floodlight streaming in my bedroom. I jumped out of bed to find the person responsible and scream at them. But it was the moon. A full moon that managed to beam it's light into my bedroom despite the buildings and pollution standing in its way.

Trees can grow and the moon does shine in Brooklyn. Things happen in Brooklyn. My first apartment happened in Brooklyn. For the first month I lived there I would open my eyes in the morning and marvel at my life. I fell in love with the wrong people in Brooklyn -- and was someone else's wrong woman there, too. People climbed through my bedroom window unannounced and the neighborhood telephone company man who frequented the fire escape saw me naked on a weekly basis -- all of it in Brooklyn.














I do this a lot, reminisce about places I no longer live, mostly Brooklyn and Manhattan, (occasionally Alaska). I have a lot of friends back east and am asked all the time "when are you moving back?" Truthfully, I don't know, maybe never.

It's true that I hated California at first, but that's no longer the case. I could never afford to buy a house here, (which is convenient seeing as we have no intention of settling here permanently, nor do I find home ownership a worthwhile way to spend my life and especially my time), but for now I am in the right place with the right job and moving back to New York, no matter how much I love it and desperately miss it, does not make sense.

Instead I bore you with these sweet little nothings -- love notes to a time and place gone by.

"Get me away from here, I'm dying..."

I haven't update this thing in forever, something for which a bigger writer would apologize.

I'm in RI as I write this, a day and half away from my flight home and the end of some extensive travels, as of late. I spent the last weekend in May (um, I think it was the last weekend in May) in New York, kickin' it with friends. It was a typical whirlwind around my hometown and, as always, the city healed all the ills that was ailin' me. As I strolled through the newly renovated Washington Square Park on my first morning in the city, I bumped into my freshman year composition professor -- one of my first and most influential mentors who left a distinct thumbprint on my innerself. The memory of our quick conversation turns my knees to water; knowing him is a truly life-affirming experience. I'm not sure there's a higher compliment. Anyway, I walked around the village taking pictures of things, absorbing the city around me, fighting fatigue to experience every block as fully as possible. Living in New York is not within our current realm of reality, but it's still something I cannot function without.

A week and half later, Sean and I headed for the Grand Canyon, via Las Vegas. We spent one night in that nuclear disaster of a city, confirming all the worst suspicions I'd harbored about that tasteless monstrosity. I really fail to see the point of it. If you're going there to gamble, well, that's just sad. (Not my dog just died sad, but watching an old woman in a housecoat wander around a liquor store at 9am filling her basket with gallon jugs of grain alcohol, sad.) So, if one doesn't feel the need to let the casinos treat them like assholes, taking all their money, one could spend her time drinking. But, why there? The strip is not exactly pedestrian friendly and, honestly, you can run around binge drinking in any city worth its salt -- why bother with a fake city like Vegas? Are these people afraid of real cities? In real cities there are also restaurants, as in GOOD restaurants, not just restaurants to make the tourists feel like they're eating at a fancy Denny's, and you can see any number of vapid musicals, has-been comedians, or whatever frightening Cirque de Soleil act happens to be showing. So Vegas was a big "what the fuck?!" for me.

Here's a photo of the scary crackhead motel across the street from our degenerate Vegas hotel.













We left Vegas and drove to Zion National Park in Utah for a quick bus tour to some of the more accessible sights and then headed straight to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Please realize that there is no good way to explain the geography we experienced. Zion places you next to soaring red walls of rock and the drive to the Grand Canyon brings you through the most delicate and lovely national forests imaginable. We ended up exploring both the North Rim and the South Rim, with a stunning drive through Pueblo country and it's vermillion hills in between.













The highlight of our trip was a mule ride into the canyon, experiencing every layer of rock as we descended.

And here I am, after three short days, in Rhode Island visiting family and wrapping my head around the high school reunion I went to last night. This event falls into the same category as cruiseline travel did for David Foster Wallace: "a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again." Don't get me wrong, it was refreshing to catch up with people who had fallen off my radar 14 years ago and in whose lives I was genuinely interested. But, to be honest, I don't really think any of us change, not deep down. An individual's consciousness may expand or (tragically) narrow, but the essence of any given person rarely goes untouched.

Being among people who I never really knew (my fault, not theirs), in a place I never at all liked, only reminds me of the worst parts of myself, parts I've worked to reconcile as years and experience took me to better places. I'm also perplexed by how few people left the region -- watching the local news tonight made me want to light myself on fire and run toward the sunset.

It's almost 1am pacific time as I end this post, a little afraid to fall asleep because I cannot dream when I'm here and dissatisfaction flavors my tongue like an hangover. Sister, there is no helping this and I want to go home.

Man of the hour

This week, W.S. Merwin won his second Pulitzer prize in poetry for The Shadow Of Sirius. In general, Merwin is a fascinating creature: a child he wrote hymns (his father was a minister) and along with being a successful and highly prolific poet, he is a well-established translator of pretty much every other Romance language into English. Merwin is now in his 80's and lives in Maui where he is deeply involved in restoration of the tropical forests.














When You Go Away
by W.S. Merwin

When you go away the wind clicks around to the north
The painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls
Showing the black walls
The clock goes back to striking the same hour
That has no place in the years

And at night wrapped in the bed of ashes
In one breath I wake
It is the time when the beards of the dead get their growth
I remember that I am falling
That I am the reason
And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy

Memory problems

Last night my husband quoted a line from one of my favorite e.e. Cummings poems and when I tried to remember more about the poem there was nothing there in my brain. It was like opening up a book you've read a hundred times to find it inexplicably blank. This whole inner monologue of panic came about because the poem has entered my life on more than one occasion, so it seems impossible that I could ever forget it.

Years ago, I'd say when I was in my early teens, I was channel surfing one random Saturday afternoon (a typically short and unrewarding process without cable and only about 10 channels to choose from, 3 of them being PBS) and settled on a random movie where a rather familiar-looking man brought a woman into a bookstore and insisted on buying her a book of poetry. A scene or two later a poem was recited via a voice-over and it just devastated me. But, when I went to a bookstore to find the poem, I couldn't remember the author or the title, just the fact that the words "rain" and "hands" appeared in it - not a lot to go on.

Naturally, I never found it and eventually forgot about both the movie and the poem. About 8 or so years later, my college roommate brought home a copy of Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters to watch for a class. Not only was that THE movie from years before - I recognized it instantly and was amazed to learn it was a Woody Allen movie I'd had such a reaction towards and that the random actor was Michael Caine (!) - but, best of all, there was that poem again. It still ranks among my happiest discoveries and reignited my interest in poetry. Since then the movie has also become a top favorite of mine, among Woody Allen's body of work and movies in general.

A few years later a soon-to-be lover sent me this poem to explain his intentions - the relationship was ultimately unsuccessful, but it was a very effective form of communication. And now, my husband likes to quote the last line to me (and I love hearing it from him) and I feel as though the movie, the poem and I have a long, shared history, much like I have with people.

From time to time it's necessary to explain the function of poetry to people due to its inaccessible qualities. Unlike novels or short stories, there isn't room for explanation - the reader has to trust her own feelings and create personal meaning, as opposed to struggling with what the poet wants to convey. This makes people nervous, understandably. So, I suppose that this example is as good a way as any to demonstrate how a poem can embed itself in a person, connecting the words on the page to experience, freezing a moment beyond rote, empty memorization.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
by E. E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

The Two-Headed Calf

Back when I didn't share an office this poem hung on my door.

Most people didn't notice it; a few read it and didn't even try to understand it. But a hopeful minority of visitors read it and smiled the same pained, but tickled smile that I always feel creep across my face when I read it.

The Two-Headed Calf by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

This is Amy at 32

My birthday was Thursday. I’ve always embraced aging – intellectual and emotional growth are important experiences – both fun and terrifying in the same way hallucinogens are. My twenties felt like a long, slow burn – thank fuck that’s over. Personally, I was well-warned, in the strangest of ways, about adolescence: 70’s era instructional videos, much like the pornographic movies of that period, are relatively honest, yet go about displaying this honesty in the most contrived fashion imaginable. I was fully prepared to menstruate, but everyone failed to mention that time between my first legal drink and the end of my third decade, other than the whole one can't rent a car until the age of 25, thing.

I’ve always had plenty of adult advice at my disposal, and often take much of it to heart, so why didn’t anyway pull me aside and say: “Hey, guess what? Your twenties will suck: fear and loathing, and pain. You’ll be at the bottom of the ladder, you’ll be broke, you’ll make questionable decisions, one after the next, after the next, after the next and you will behave this way until you get so sick of yourself that something either implodes or explodes. Once the smoke clears and coals turn grey, you’ll be in a better place.”

It’s not the pain, though, that bothers me, it’s the primal fear I have, we all have, about time and its expiration. Do any of us use our time well? I suppose the only thing to say has already been said by the Faces:

Poor young grandson, there’s nothing I can say
You’ll have to learn, just like me
And that’s the hardest way Ooh la la

Back in the physical world, we have a new couch. This is a fabulous and welcome thing and we even bought it at a fair price, but it also makes me feel settled. And this is, deep down, a little unsettling. There’s always something in me that longs to purge my belongings and move on. I don’t believe in fresh starts, but am energized by the experience of unpacking my life in a new places, the learning process is filled with discoveries and longing. At least, this is what I tell myself, regardless of the fact that my last big move was very difficult. The grass? Yes, it’s always greener over there, thanks fer askin!

April is rapidly come to an end, so I’m long overdue in posting a poem for you to ponder or at least scan and discard, maybe?

A Momentary Longing To Hear Sad Advice from One Long Dead
by Kenneth Koch

Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat
Saying to me as we walked across the Yard
Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said
You are not wearing overcoat. He said,
You should do as I say not do as I do.
Just how American it was and how late Forties it was
Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me
In his New York apartment sitting on chair
Table directly in front of him. There did he write? I am wondering.
Look at this photograph said of his mother and father.
Coney Island. Do they look happy? He couldn't figure it out.
Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture.
Pogo. Walt Kelly must have read Joyce Delmore said.
Why don't you ask him?
Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not.
Your parents don't look happy but it is just a photograph.
Maybe they felt awkward posing for photographs.
Maybe it is just a bad photograph. Delmore is not listening
I want to hear him tell me something sad but however true.
Delmore in his tomb is sitting. People say yes everyone is dying
But here read this happy book on the subject. Not Delmore. Not that rueful man.



Koch (L) and Ginsburg (R), 1977